Snapshots, or: Visual Culture's Clichés

摘要

Visual culture scholars and historians of photography are looking for new ways to interpret and historicize vernacular snapshot photography, seeking to explain one of snapshot photography's defining characteristics: repetitiveness in form and content. This paper proposes to account for repetition by linking the snapshot to a seemingly unrelated vernacular phenomenon: the cliché. The two phenomena — one visual, the other linguistic — have more in common than at first appears. The genealogies of the cliché — an “expression or idea that has lost its originality or force through overuse” — and the snapshot photograph — “predictable, conservative, and repetitive in both form and content”, go back to the same point of origin: the printing workshops of nineteenth century France, while at the same time presenting a continuation of a pre-modern, oral tradition in which knowledge is transmitted from generation to generation through repetition.View full textDownload full textRelated var addthis_config = { ui_cobrand: "Taylor & Francis Online", services_compact: "citeulike,netvibes,twitter,technorati,delicious,linkedin,facebook,stumbleupon,digg,google,more", pubid: "ra-4dff56cd6bb1830b" }; Add to shortlist Link Permalink http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17540763.2011.593922